Her white classmates ignored her. She walked alone down the hallways and sat by herself at lunch. Surgeon R. Adams Cowley refused to face her side of the room during lectures. And the school wouldn’t let her share a dorm room with other students, instead clearing out an office on a separate floor.

Stepping inside the University of Maryland School of Nursing as the first black student was like walking into an “igloo,” Esther McCready says.

“People were just totally avoiding me,” she said.

“After the first day, I had a headache like I had never had before, with all the stress. I remember when I got into the front door, my mother took one look at me and said, ‘You don’t have to go back.’ ”

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But she did go back after that historic day in 1950, leaving open the door for other black students to follow.

McCready said she never intended to become a civil rights trailblazer. She just wanted to study nursing, a dream she had since she was 8, without leaving her native Baltimore.

She sent letters requesting information to all the local schools. “We don’t accept Negroes,” came one reply after another.

Only University of Maryland sent a catalog, but after months passed and the school year began without any word about her application, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People helped her sue.

The NAACP sent a lawyer to argue the case before the state’s highest court: Thurgood Marshall, another Baltimore native who went on to win Brown v. the Board of Education and become the nation’s first black Supreme Court justice. Marshall was victorious, but McCready needed to rely on inner strength to then make it through school, the uncomfortable glares and the racist teachers.

“I think it was divine guidance. I consider it a mission,” said McCready, now 76. “I could play by myself as a child. That was preparation for being alone.”

kvolkmann@baltimoreexaminer.com